The park has since compromised by offering visitors a choice between using the previous fingerprint system and high-tech facial recognition, China Daily reports.

The park is one of many institutions to introduce facial recognition at its entrances. China has been aggressively rolling out facial recognition in the past five years, originally as a means of boosting security but now as a means of bringing consumer convenience to people’s lives, particularly in e-payments.

However, since Prof Guo questioned the necessity of it, there have been bigger conversations about the extensive amount of data kept on citizens.

What happened at the park?

Prof Guo, a law professor at the Zhejiang Sci-Tech University in eastern China, is a season ticket holder at the Hangzhou Safari Park.

In previous years, he has used fingerprint recognition to enter. But on 17 October, he received a message telling him that the park’s system had been upgraded, and it had become mandatory for visitors to register their details using the facial recognition system.

Will he succeed?

Dr Mimi Zou, a fellow in Chinese Commercial Law at Oxford University, says the case is very likely to be dismissed if Prof Guo continues to pursue it.

She says that, at present, “there is not a legally binding instrument that deals directly” with his claim, which is that the park is making collection of his biometric data a condition of entry, and therefore rendering his consent meaningless.

However, she says that there has been “a growing yet fragmented regulatory landscape of privacy and data protection laws in recent years”, as well as “a national voluntary standard on data privacy known as the Personal Information Security Specifications”.

Dr Zou tells the BBC that, although it is currently voluntary, it “lays a normative foundation for a more binding legal framework”.

She says that several big tech companies like Tencent and Alipay have trialled the scheme based on its current standards.

“I believe the rapid development of these standards reflects the growing privacy concerns among the general public in relation to how non-state actors are collecting and using their personal data. We are seeing an increasing responsiveness of Chinese regulators in tackling these concerns,” she says.

But she notes that state surveillance is “the elephant in the room” in cases against commercial/business actors that involve the legal protection of Chinese people’s data or privacy rights.

“In this realm – and not just in China – there is no such thing as personal privacy.”

Court case sparks wider debate

Image copyrightSina WeiboImage caption Thousands of Weibo users are using the hashtag #ChinasFirstFacialRecognitionCase

Now that questions about facial recognition have entered the courts, there are big discussions online in China about the technology.

Facial recognition for payment in shops and supermarkets has increasingly become the norm, replacing the earlier trend of scanning QR codes attached to mobile apps.

And it has even been popularised among young people as a tool for entertainment. In late August, a mobile app called Zao made headlines because it could sophisticatedly take a print of somebody’s face, and put it almost seamlessly on the body of a celebrity, making people appear as if they were a character in their favourite film or TV programme.

However, within a week of Zao being launched, it was removed from online stores, after users noted the app’s terms and conditions “gave the developers the global right to permanently use any image created on the app for free”.

Will it slow down?

It is unlikely that the momentum for facial recognition will slow down in China, particularly because of its success in netting wanted fugitives.

Much has been written by official media on the “successful use” of facial recognition to net hundreds of criminals in China’s “Operation Fox Hunt”.

What’s more, China has indicated that it will aggressively extend its surveillance operations by 2020 using a highly sophisticated “Skynet” surveillance network.

In 2017, China had approximately 170 million CCTV cameras. But an estimated 400 million new cameras, many fitted with artificial intelligence and facial recognition, are expected to be in place by the end of the year.

BBC Monitoring reports and analyses news from TV, radio, web and print media around the world. You can follow BBC Monitoring on Twitter and Facebook.

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